So here’s what nobody tells you about escaping Palo Alto: you can’t. Not really. You can put continents between yourself and those manicured lawns where old men in white execute shots with the precision of surgeons, but the Ghetto, yeah that’s what they call it, the Faculty Ghetto, like living in five million dollar Craftsman bungalows is somehow equivalent to systematic disinvestment, that place gets in your wiring. It becomes the voice in your head that spots hypocrisy at fifty yards, that understands words mean something and using them carelessly does real damage.
The lawn bowlers don’t give a shit about any of this. That’s what gets me. While everyone else is frantically optimizing their leisure, grooming five year olds for Ivy colleges, these guys opted out of the entire performance. They’re rolling balls across grass with the quiet desperation of people who’ve cracked some code the rest of us are too busy disrupting to figure out. It’s obscene, really. The patience. The analog pleasure. The complete absence of hustle in a place where even aging is something to be conquered through biotech.
I’ve tried leaving seventeen different ways. But here I am, standing on this immaculate green, watching these old bastards refuse to be consumed by contradiction. Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe you can’t atone your way out of where you’re from. Maybe the only honest move is acknowledging the privilege, the complicity, the fundamental dishonesty of calling comfort a ghetto, and then deciding what you’re going to do anyway.
Roll the ball. Drink the coffee. Exist in it without pretending it isn’t there.
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